Wilson's Initiation into the Cripple Club
by IzzBella91
Summary: House is angry. Wilson is angry. People get thrown down stairs, vicodin are taken, and eye patches are worn. Their screwed up relationship through House's screwed up point of view. Slash, but mostly vague.


**A/N: This was written awhile ago so at the time I honestly didn't know they'd do this whole story arc thing with Wilson having a girlfriend. **

**Disclaimer: House is the creation of David Shore and is property of Bad Hat Harry Productions and probably many other people that aren't me…**

--

HOUSE'S POV

Dark, dark eyes watch me, watch me, watch me.

Judge me.

Golden flecks dance in a pool of brown and I watch as the swirl of black grows and grows until it consumes all the rest of the muddy rainbow.

"You don't have a right to be angry," he says, eyes piercing and breaths coming in rapid bursts (trying to huff and puff until he blows the house down.)

Seconds, minutes, hours pass by with their accustomed slowness. And then he comes to me again.

"I understand why you're angry," he says, sighing and crossing his arms defensively.

"_You should be angry. And I'm sorry,"_ is what I wish he would say. Although by everyone else's standards he has nothing to be sorry for. But I'm not everyone else and anger clings to me stubbornly like water droplets to skin or leaves to trees. However uncalled for and misplaced that anger is.

I'm too arrogant to be angry at myself, my inner-Wilson tells me, so I take it out on the only person who can stand to be around me.

I easily block out that irritating voice with a swift mental block. I am always right… and I'm right in my anger.

But then why is my stubborn anger becoming decidedly more compliant and is fading fast?

He stands with crutches secured under either armpit, awkwardly gripping the sides. "So, can I join the cripple club now?"

And he has the audacity to look utterly pathetic at this moment, like a kicked puppy. Not even a kicked puppy. He more resembles a baby rabbit that has been shaken and beaten with a shovel, and then comes back from the dead just to give you wide, sad eyes. I shake my head and tell him that to join the cripples club he'd have to become crippled on the inside as well.

I'm terribly drunk, by the way.

Falling down, don't know feet from hands, world spinning nauseatingly drunk.

And he has the nerve to stand before me in his stupid green and red striped tie (Christmas is over, Wilson) and his stupid awkward crutches and sober words and and and…

Give me those eyes.

He shouldn't be giving me those eyes.

"It's not my fault," I say.

He raises a single furry eyebrow, "No?"

I glance away from him, choosing the TV as a better staring contest partner. To the lovely and glamorous hippopotamus that fills the screen I say, "Why can't you just blame God like every other angsty cripple?"

"I thought I wasn't crippled enough to be called a cripple."

"You'll get there," I respond.

He smiles, baring Crest happy-white teeth, and apparently takes that as an invitation to sit down on my couch with his crippled ass. I poke his side with my cane.

"Ow!"

I poke him again, grinning sadistically as he yelps. "My couch."

My couch. My lumpy, too large couch that once was the bed of my too nice friend with his too big heart and his too wide eyes. And now I reprimand him for taking up so much space with his too big ass.

His response is to roll his eyes and call me an ass (such an uncreative insult, really.)

I _am _an ass, and am quite proud of that fact.

As we settle back into the cushions, enveloped in warm, soft fabric that still somehow holds his scent, I struggle with the feeling that is burrowing in my stomach, gnawing at my mind. I gulp, gulp, gulp the wincingly sour drink in my lucky shot glass, stomach churning as it slides down my throat and mixes with my dinner. Uck…

I throw the glass across the room in disgust and am incredibly satisfied as it shatters and makes the most beautiful, tinkling, high-pitched music. Wilson laughs, not drunkenly at all, "Random, useless destruction is great catharsis, House, but soon you'll be out of glasses."

I do that a lot – throw the glass across the room. One morning I woke up to find, not only a splitting headache, but a mountain of glass glistening in the morning sun.

"You came here to make me feel guilty. It's not going to work. Compassion isn't the only emotion that I'm lacking."

He grins this slow-motion, sweet grin that could mean a million different things. "I think I know you a bit better than Foreman. And I can be as stubborn of an ass as you. I'll get you to feel guilty… and then I'll milk it for all it's worth."

I roll my eyes and am scared to think that he may be successful. I can already feel my shoulder hurting…

Damn shoulder.

He must really not know me if he thinks I'm going to follow him around, trying to make amends. It's not like I intentionally hurt him… much.

The thing is… Wilson is annoying. So annoying it makes me want to rip my own ears off and feed them to raccoons. I don't know _why _raccoons would want to eat my ears, but that's how annoying Wilson was being.

We were walking at a hop-skip-gallop-run type of thing (which is how I can maneuver quickly with my three legs) when I just _happened _to stick out my cane and whack Wilson in the shins.

That's not where he got hurt, though.

It was actually three hours and twenty-three minutes later when I grabbed hold of his collar, hoisted him to his tippie-toes, and threw him down the two flights of stairs that every good hospital has at least one of.

Um, yeah – I was angry.

See, the shin-whacking thing turned into the punch House in the eye thing which turned into the slapping, kicking, grunting, socking, scratching, throwing, hitting…. thing.

But that still wasn't it.

After we were both spent… and after many men with shiny security badges were called and gripping me hard by the shoulders… we laughed and got over it.

It was when we were laughing that _she _came in.

This blonde thing with pink lips and kind eyes. The blonde whir ran all the way from across the clinic (which we had chosen as the place of our showdown) and embraced the newly-bruised Wilson, tsk-tsking and reprimanding him for fighting. She sounded like she was talking to a five year old sent to detention for pulling a girl's pig-tails. _Wilson is not five_, I thought to myself, _he's quite nearly forty – so why is this woman babying him?_

Well, it turns out that he had a girlfriend. A quite pretty one at that. And nice. Smart – a doctor, even.

I hated her.

Which is what I told Wilson as we neared the stairwell. To which he responded quite eloquently that I was just jealous.

I didn't take too kindly to that.

Well, he also said that I was a miserable son-of-a-bitch whose only purpose was to make his life miserable as well and that I should spend more time trying to trick a girl to go out with me and less time sabotaging all his relationships.

Oh, but it doesn't end there.

See, I'm really not _that _sensitive. It's when he expanded on his jealousy theory that I got mad.

A little too mad.

I didn't mean for him to go tumbling down, down, down those many hard steps. I definitely didn't mean for his leg to twist backwards and make a loud cracking noise. And the fact that he ended up lying motionless on the landing in a tangled heap of limbs… that wasn't what I had planned.

It just turned out that way.

It seems he has forgiven me though, at least superficially. I glance at the pieces of wood leaning against the coffee table. His crutches lay on either side of my cane, slightly overlapping. It just seems… wrong.

I don't want him to join the cripple club.

Actually, I forbid him from joining.

_Yeah, that fixes his leg right up, _I think sarcastically.

I watch him out of the corner of my eye as the night wears on.

My leg becomes alive, fiery with pain, when I see him cringe as I accidentally jostle the couch cushions.

He sits so stiffly, careful not to hurt his bruised ribs and sore, abused body.

God, I threw him down the _stairs_.

That's a new low, even for me.

Wilson says this, and I'm pulled out of my reverie.

His voice is low and soft, not as judging as his dark eyes. Soft and searching.

I find the lack of yelling strange. Very strange. And I wonder why the change.

He asks, "Do you really hate Madeleine that much?"

"Who's Madeleine?" I ask, not even being sarcastic for once.

Both eyebrows raise this time. "My girlfriend – the one that apparently offended you enough to toss me down a story or two."

"Oh, that one."

"What do you mean, _that one_? You practically attacked her." He says incredulously.

"I attack a lot of people. You can't expect me to remember them all."

He pauses and stares. "How charming."

I grin.

Then I think. And think.

And think.

I wait until Wilson's mind has been taken over by the singing dog on the screen before I say, "So, this girlfriend, she doesn't mind that you're spending the night with the guy that _attacked_ her."

He _knows_ that tone. It's the same tone that I use when talking about his many wives. I can tell he hates the smirk that has attached itself to my face.

He says simply, "Hey, at least she got away without any broken limbs, unlike me if you don't remember."

He points to his cast and tries to raise his foot but finds it hurts too much.

"I refuse to apologize."

"Who asked you to?"

I am very apprehensive. Someone _doesn't _want me to apologize? No one would believe it. "Most people would feel a bit hurt... besides physically, obviously... that their friend threw them down the stairs."

"You're a cripple," he responds in that oh-so-blunt way of his that I love... or wait, that's right, that I hate.

"And this is relevant because..."

I feel like he's going to respond in a sappy, lovey-dovey way of his... like how now we can be cripples together and a bunch of bullshit like that. Instead he concludes, "Well, that's as close to beating someone up as you're ever going to get."

Ok, now see.

He obviously _provoked_ me.

You can't say he didn't have it coming.

And, ok, it wasn't my _intention_ for him to land face first in the pile of shattered glass from my earlier misguided catharsis, it really wasn't.

The fates have been cruel to dear Wilson today, it seems.

It's at the hospital, with Wilson sitting on an exam table in front of me, eye patch secured around the poor eye that was invaded by my broken shot glass, that he says, "She dumped me."

I respond, "Hunh. Saw that coming."

"I know."

He looks so beaten-baby bunny again that I feel like laughing. Not in as much of a sadistic way as before, though. He has little red scrapes along his face and arms and shoulders, the lacerations standing out against his pale skin. He has his shirt off and I can see the bandages barely holding his ribs together, the stark whiteness matching the cast that cumbersomely hangs off his leg. And to top it all off he looks like a pirate after a failed pillage with that eye patch secured around his head, tufts of hair sticking out every which way.

"You are pathetic," I say, grinning maniacally.

He swings his cast heavily back and forth. "You... you're the one who caused all this. It's not like I'm normally so accident-prone. You... you threw me down the _stairs_!"

I shake my head, eyes following the swinging cast. "Let it go, Wilson. I'm not sorry."

The words echo, echo, echo through the room, around the room, and they fill the room to the brim until my utter ambivalence leaks into the world. His face scrunches up... he's disappointed. I watch as his thin, bruised chest rises and falls in unchecked anger. My eyes travel up his flushed neck and to the bruise painted on his chin and finally to meet his fiery eyes.

Yep, he's angry all right.

He clenches his fists and jumps down, ready for a fight.

He apparently forgets that he can't walk and falls straight to the floor with a pained yell.

"Idiot," I say.

The mess on the floor stares up at me, giving me a look of complete disbelief. Which I adore because, come on, it's _me_. What did he expect?

His voice comes out in a hiss. "Why can't you show remorse... just for once in your life... just a little bit? Can't you even summon up an ounce of human feeling?"

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry for your broken body, for transforming the once athletic and unmarred into a crippled mass of ugly flesh like my own. For turning you into me. I'm sorry for being angry. For throwing you down the stairs. For throwing the glass and then pushing you into it. I'm sorry for drinking. I'm sorry for being jealous and for attacking all your girlfriends... for attacking you. I'm sorry that your bare back is on that cold, dirty tile. I'm sorry for not being able to say I'm sorry.

"Feelings are for the weak," I say, voice cold and empty.

And, I think, he is the epitome of weakness sitting on that floor, giving me those eyes, feeling all those annoying feelings. In one instant he has become everything I hate and he has caused me to feel everything that I abhor.

Feelings. Feelings. Feelings.

All these fucking feelings.

Whispered words travel from his lips to my not-quite-so-closed-off ears. "One day the ice surrounding your heart will thaw over, House. And you'll be stuck with all these messed up human emotions like the rest of us."

I can tell by the hidden sorrow in his pretty brown eyes that he is telling this to himself. The only way he can deal with this is to believe that I have no emotion, rather than believing that I am, in fact, human – just incredibly cruel.

Well, sorry Wilson. Sometime it's just the luck of the draw.

Some people get emotions. I get intelligence. I get talent.

Deal.

But sometimes the brain just overloads on cynicism.

And the heart overdoses on guilt.

And the man with no emotion finds himself lending a hand to a friend in need.

Yeah, well, that doesn't happen.

I leave him on the floor, broken body and broken heart.

--

My leg is on fire. The devil that replaced my thigh muscle laughs at my predicament, tearing into my sore flesh ever the more.

I yell at the grinning devil on my thigh, telling him to go torture some other soul. There are people who deserve it more than me.

See, now if he answered me _back, _then I would have to go to the psych ward.

For now I'm good, though.

I cling to the sheets and continue to scream into my pillow, my yells muffled to the point of incomprehensibility. To the point where only my mind knows the pain I am in.

My mind uses this knowledge and runs away with it. It imagines a variety of scenarios, many of them including a giant saw and me using said saw to rip this damn leg off.

Utterly useless, it is.

But then all that would be left is a bloody stub of a leg and then no hooker would sleep with me.

And then the pain becomes so mind-numbingly unbearable that it pushes all thoughts and memories and feelings away. Pushes the guilt away.

I down vicodin after vicodin even though I already know it won't work.

My stomach churns and I can feel the bile rolling and gurgling up into my throat. Pain follows and sets up camp in my esophagus. I am almost relieved as I lurch over the side of the bed, puke spilling over onto my blue carpet.

That will be a fun stain to get out.

My mind screams and my leg screams and my whole fucking body screams until all other noise is drowned out and all that's left is one big, excruciating howl.

I pass out and dream of lava pits and sawed off limbs coming back to life.

--

I wake up to a familiar face. "I guess I was right."

The familiar face confuses me and I search my brain for anything that it could have been right about.

Pretty brown eyes tell me, "I told you that you couldn't run forever. Your emotions caught up with you and look what happened."

I get very angry at those eyes and say to them in an attemptingly-condescending voice, "It's more like my damn _infarction _caught up with me. Those things can be tricky, you know."

Those brown eyes turn sad and for a moment I think maybe my morphine drip is turned up too high. Because eyes the color of mud should not be that pretty. They should be dull and boring, not glimmering and glowing. They should not emote so much feeling. They should veil, not express. And they should not be expressing such sorrow.

Such anger.

The eyes blink and at least some emotion becomes hidden. "It really is a pity that you went straight to guilt – bypassing joy, surprise, excitement, contentment, love…"

"Yeah, I get the picture," I interrupt, sincerely tired of this same conversation.

Wilson moves, all over, actually. He waves his arms while pacing back and forth awkwardly on his crutches, his furry eyebrows moving up and down to the beat. It is all fairly amusing. So amusing that I barely catch what he's saying. "See, that's your problem. You do actually understand. You know what's going on inside your head, you just ignore it. You feel things like everyone else, and then you do everything possible to reject them. Like try to kill yourself."

Now wait just a minute. Something went very wrong in this conversation very fast.

I think, think, think. My brain hurts.

But with all that thinking I can't come up with why Wilson believes that I…

Oh.

Pills… lots and lots of pills. And lots of liquor. Liquor that was positioned just too damned close to my bed. Liquor used to swallow down the many pills.

God is punishing me, I think.

So now I not only get to deal with a near-death experience, I get to have everyone think I'm suicidal.

"I'm not suicidal… just stupid," I say not so quietly and not so pathetically.

Wilson's head shakes back and forth in a dizzying fashion. "It's amazing that you would admit to either. But you're not getting out of this one. Houdini wouldn't be able to get out of this one."

I am somewhat appalled that he thinks I'm not as good as Houdini. I mean, come on, I'm _House. _

Somewhere in my worn-out body I summon up enough energy to pull off some of my usual deflections. "I love the caring, really do. I'm just interested to know why you made giving the tin man a heart your crusade."

"You're my friend."

I smirk, "Still? I thought I sabotaged our friendship years ago."

His runaway limbs seem to calm down simultaneously. His arms fall flat to his sides and he sits down heavily on the bed near my feet. I have the sudden urge to kick him, but I don't.

I find it funny that even his eyebrows have gone still.

He looks at me when I laugh (more like an angry scoff, if I do say so myself) and breathes out a little (which I suppose was him laughing in return.) He says, "I guess I can be as stubborn as you after all."

He sits hunched over and eyes cast down for a very long time. Or maybe only a few seconds. Time becomes out-of-whack after almost dying.

Somehow I fall asleep.

I wake up to discover an arm draped across my chest and a face scrunched against my shoulder. I think, _this can't be right._

I shove Wilson's arm a little and get a grunt in return. I think of how perfectly wrong the whole situation is. Here we are, two broken bodies lying in this hospital bed, our similarly broken consciousnesses not even able to comprehend this screwed up thing.

This screwed up thing that is our relationship.

I lean over and whisper in the conveniently located ear, "I'm sorry."

And then I go back to sleep, my subconscious accepting what my awake mind could not.

And I am happy.

--

**A/N: Hm… this is a very strange fic, now that I think about it. I'm not completely sure what it's about. I guess it's about achieving happiness in the oddest of situations… I guess that's somewhat House-like (he can never be a normal sort of happy.) But I must be a very sadistic person for torturing Wilson and House so much along the way. Oh well. Please review. **


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